This morning, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos shared a new direction for the paper’s opinion section, both with staff and, for some reason, with all of Twitter: from now on, the opinion section will “be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” As a result, opinion section editor David Shipley is out, and I am losing my fucking mind.
In a message so unhinged I literally had to check with people that it wasn’t an elaborate hack, Bezos writes
There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity….
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
Bezos writes that he offered Shipley, who became head of the opinion section in 2022, the opportunity to oversee this new direction, and Shipley declined. In a memo to staff from embattled WaPo CEO Will Lewis, Lewis thanks Bezos for “clearly and succinctly spelling out what we stand for at The Washington Post, and I will be so very proud for The Post to be known for its two key pillars: our belief in free markets and personal liberties.”
I would argue that The Washington Post (former employer of Nathan and me) is known for, you know, news, though lately has become known for buyouts and kissing Trump’s ass, with Bezos joining other billionaire tech moguls and newspaper owners in securing his own bag over the paper’s credibility. While Bezos’ ownership of The Post gives him, in the most basic sense, the right to shape some of its strategy as he sees fit, so blatantly spelling out his own priorities and commanding his writers to take them up feels like a massive overstep of his power, and yet another clear signal that the free press is crumbling in the face of our new, incredibly stupid regime.
Legacy outlets like The Post and The New York Times have long held up the fact that their opinion pages are siloed and separate from their news coverage as an excuse to throw all kinds of toxic spaghetti at the wall. While it is true that news and opinion are separate sections, as someone who’s worked at both digital outlets and The Post, I’ve always found this a flimsy justification. Readers raised on digital news are used to their outlets eschewing some of the stodgier legacy practices of “objectivity” and “the view from nowhere,” gravitating toward writers and sites with strong voices who don’t seek to erase their own humanity in pursuit of the news. Sites like those of my Gawker peers, or our colleagues at independent outlets today, are popular because we write like real people who live in the real world, because we don’t feel professionally bound to put our brains and hearts aside in fealty to some neutral “both sides.” That doesn’t mean we don’t hold to journalistic values of truth, fairness, and humanity in our coverage and reporting, but we know the news doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Our sites run “opinion” pieces, but we don’t have opinion sections; we don’t need a special space in which to showcase our values, because they undergird all of our coverage.
This helps readers trust us, but it also means the younger ones might not be familiar with the structure of newspapers that make hard distinctions between “opinion” and “news.” You could correctly call this a kind of media illiteracy, but I think it also speaks to changing reader expectations, and to the fact that, as much as journalists (myself included) would like to pretend otherwise, most readers aren’t interested in the nitty-gritty structure of a paper and the different journalistic practices, rules, and ethics that go into its sections. Readers want to know what’s going on and want help making sense of it from writers they trust. They won’t see an outlet do hard-hitting, vital investigations and then run screeds against trans people as fundamentally different things; they will see the whole outlet as morally bankrupt and untrustworthy, and they’ll go get their news elsewhere.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a variety of opinions on an outlet’s page, but that an outlet without a consistent moral center, whatever the personal politics of its writers or owner, will alienate readers today. There’s no world where The Post’s opinion section can be the personal mouthpiece of Bezos and his concepts of the “free market” and “personal liberties” and still have readers trust its news output. Whatever the revamped opinion section will be, it will irreparably devalue all the good work The Post’s writers and reporters do in the eyes of readers.
In his memo to staff, Lewis wrote,
I am very excited about this new clarity and transparency, and cannot wait to see it brought to life in our opinion section. Every day. This is not about siding with any political party. This is about being crystal clear about what we stand for as a newspaper. Doing this is a critical part of serving as a premier news publication across America and for all Americans.
It is indeed transparency into what the paper stands for: Jeff Bezos, and by extension his oligarch cohort, want to be The Washington Post now, and the role of the everyday people who read the paper and support it with their money is to be force-fed the contents of Bezos' head. The “America” and “Americans” Lewis cites aren’t readers the paper respects and serves; they’re grist for the mill of Bezos and his buddies. Even if Bezos never touches the news section, readers will see his hands all over it. This is “News by Jeff” now, no matter how many “opinion” banners the paper slaps up.
